If you are able to create a good healthcare facility, doctors will love to come back and serve their own people: Dr Atul Kapoor

Patients in UP have to travel long distances, 200-300 km from the villages. The public healthcare facilities exist, but they are not enough to take care of the population.Shahid Akhter | ETHealthWorld | September 09, 2017, 10:03 IST

In an interview with ETHealthworld,Dr Atul Kapoor, Managing Director, Regency Healthcare, shares his journey and talks about the existing challenges in Uttar Pradesh. Edited excerpts:

How do you see Uttar Pradesh from healthcare prism?In the country, every 7th person in the world is from India, but when you compare the state the conditions are not really conducive for proper healthcare. Patients have to travel long distances. The public healthcare facilities exist, but they are not enough to take care of the population that we have in the state. The healthcare penetration is very low in the state. Unfortunately even the insurance penetration in the state is 3-4% as compared to national average of 15-20% or may be 40% metros. This drains lot of money from patient's pocket for treatment, which is itself a big impediment to get good treatment?

How do you find the facilities in Lucknow?Look at the healthcare facilities available in the state; we have very few private hospitals running in big cities. Every city would not have very big hospitals or corporate hospitals providing multi-specialty care. Even in Lucknow, there is hardly any big hospital in the private sector although KGMC, SGPGI are doing wonderful work for public and but still to access them also the patients have to travel a lot and then they have huge waiting list of may be 3 months even for things like CT scan. Now that itself is an eye opener that the facilities are really less as compared to the population that we have to cater. Today 80% of the healthcare industry is still catered by the private sector. Public health facilities like KGMC and SGPGI are doing really good work and they are producing very good doctors. If you are able to create good healthcare facilities in state then I am sure it will attract all the doctors back to the state once again.

You are a doctor from Kanpur. Tell us about your journey and when did you think of Regency?Journey has not been easy and initially the struggle was there. In 1993 we started our OPD services in hospital, by end 1994 we started indoor facility and in 1995 the hospitals were operated full-fledged. From day one we decided that there will be best equipment possible so initially all my equipments were from Siemens. People in UP, Kanpur did not have that kind of money where they could spend so much for treatment. All we doctors together made a good team and decided to keep our fees lower, so that people can come to us. We started consultation price of 50 rupees, we had general wards where we subsidized the cost by charging our higher class. Today, after 23 years, we are charging 1400 rupees for a bed for 24 hours including all services and meals for the patients.

How is Regency in sync with the latest technological advancements?Keeping in line with the advancement in infrastructure and IT, we have adopted a big IT program in the company. We employed CIO four years back and requested him to make changes in the hospital IT infrastructure so that we are able to advance the treatment and provide it to the far out areas. We are conducting programs for smaller cities where we advice treatment to patients online.

What are the challenges that you face?We are touching about 3 lakh lives in a year at the moment and we treat about thousand patients in a day. One challenge that I am facing is the infrastructure, the hospital that we made is of 100 beds right now and today we have 400 beds in the same vicinity.

Tell us about your expansion and future plans.We want to create a world class healthcare structure in UP. Presently, we have 5 facilities in Kanpur, one is the flagship hospital which I made 23 years back. Then again we started Renal Science Centre primarily for the kidney disease about 4 years back, which is a 100 bed facility. We opened a wellness center in heart of the city. Fourth, we did JB with HCG partnerships who are the pioneers in cancer care, now they operate about 25 hospitals. So again we came together in a 50-50 partnership about four years back. We have recently started a cancer hospital in JB Company about 5 months back. For 5th facility, we have a 100 bed hospital in south Kanpur which we are starting soon.We want to go ahead and make dialysis clinics in UP, Jharkhand, Bihar and MP. With HCG we want to create more cancer centres in the state of UP. In the next four years we should be expanding from 400 beds to 1000 beds and make at least 4-5 hospitals in the state. At the moment we are touching 3 lakhs lives, we want to touch 15 lakhs lives per annum once we create these facilities in UP.

With immense pride “India Live” celebrated its 10th national conference in Mumbai from 28th February to 3rd March 2019. The conference turned out to be a gold mine of information, with emphasis on academics, education and exchange of knowledge with leaders in interventional cardiology from both India and abroad.